


Lustering

by Taabe



Category: The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-18
Updated: 2007-12-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:43:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1629701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taabe/pseuds/Taabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The flamenco, the fountain of lions and the fire explain why Andrew and Percy are compelled to save lives, and why they trust each other with their own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lustering

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays, Trianne! Slashy, you got; I hope this will feel nutty, angsty and historical too. The final quotation is from Daniel Matt's translation of the Zohar.
> 
> Stealthmuffin, thanks for a dead-on accurate beta and warm encouragement over sweet potato pancakes! And Squirrelhaven and Kass, thanks for listening, and soaking, and sharing ideas.
> 
> Written for Trianne

 

 

Pincers and red-hot tongs. Gothic stone chambers where torches burned at high noon, where shrunken men in black and white dunce caps pronounced sentences between the lash and the fire.

France did not invent the reign of terror. For inspiration in this cycle of venal and scrofulous aristocracy, bloody protest and panic zeal, she need look only to her nearest neighbor, whose borders she overran and whose throne she would command long after she ceded her own.

For Spain had grown fat on malice. Had not they driven out the Jew and the Arab, who for seven centuries had built their cities, informed their crafts, music, numbers and mystic visions, and raised universities to rival Baghdad? None now wrote in the flowing script incised on the walls of the old churches; none now carved the channels of water stairs.

They had been driven down or driven out. Neighbor denounced neighbor in tribunals fed by gossip and the lust for public spectacle. None were pardoned — had not they all been born fouled? — and those who parroted their torturers at the last might win a garroting on the stake. For Mme La Guillotine is a more merciful lover than the the bonfire.

Yet in the French Pyrenees, the man who would stake his life so often against the mob and the knife grew up longing for the land across the mountains. He grew up between an imbecile mother and a distracted father, and if he had no one to tell him how to do it, equally he had no one to check the impulses of curiosity and compassion that grew out of his solitary walks among the gray stone streets of Argeles-sur-Mer.

They lived in a cool, tiled house, a set of two-story halls with red roofs and arched courtyards that turned golden when the canopies were unfurled across them in the heat of the afternoons. It lay outside the village and steps from the sands, for his mother needed the sunlight and the constant quiet of the sea.

He did not see her often. She lay in a long lighted room, so quiet the swallows nesting in the shutter brackets took no notice. He brought her sea pinks and lavender, picked too short and held too hard, and gave them to the bonne to go up with her supper tray.

As his father showed no sign of dividing enough attention from her care to arrange his son's education, young Blakeney hung about the market square, picking up phrases of Catalan and Languedoc, and _Calo_ from the dark-haired men who played their guitars barefoot around the fountain. He bought oranges, and a whistle on which he tried to imitate the guitars, and pages with grinning skulls drawn on them.

He roamed among the merchants, vintners, carvers, jugglers, and constant incoming movement of people — the Muslims and Moriscos, Jews and Gitanos, Jesuits, Protestants, philosophers and astronomers, men who loved men — who left the ceaseless conflict across the mountains. He asked questions of them all, and as he grew old enough for their answers to frighten him, he did not stop asking. Rabbis and men at the book stalls taught him to read, in a ramshackle way, telling him histories of the broken fragments of books that had survived the fanatics across the border to come to them.

In the summer of 1782, just shy of his eighteenth year, his father sent him to Perpignan, to deputize for him at a meeting of the burghers. He was set to wait in a front room, in a scalloped Louis Quinze chair, opposite a tow-haired youth who seemed intent on the palm trees outside the window.

Morning light spilled across the carpet, smoothing its heavy fibre into as airy and plain a surface as water. Long fronds stirred in the wind off the street, which blew in the pungent dust of horses and tinsmiths, and soldiers walked in the courtyard. The blond boy leaned sideways in his jacket, as though he would have lolled his legs over the chair arms if he dared, and the shining lace of his coat rucked up behind his head.

At length he turned thoughtful eyes upon the tall boy opposite, in his oddly plain attire.

"Faith! But they're slow talkers in there." He held out a satin arm. "I'm Andrew. If we must wait, we may as well join the game. Have you been long in town?"

Blakeney too had blond hair, a robust desert-sand shade bleached by the sun, and heavy against the thong that bound it. He glanced along the walls as though determining how he would redesign them or willing them out of his way. Andrew's eyes were merry and thoughtful, for his companion's intentness appealed to him. So he accepted Blakeney's hand-me-down shirt and command of the room, as of a piece with his Provencal accent and his surprised exclamation: "you're English!"

"As St. George," Andrew affirmed cheerfully, and as they grasped hands, Blakeney laughed.

"Which is not at all," he said, "for he was Turkish before we adopted him. You had as well say I'm as English as he, for I'm a transplant, though in the other direction."

All that week they were left together. Within the house, Andrew found his friend unfamiliar with many common things and possessed of the most extraordinary stories. They combed the town and the market stalls, and Andrew marveled at what he called Blakeney's impudence, for he seemed driven to talk to all sorts and never short of language. To anyone who protested their going out alone, Blakeney said they would take his own man, which meant himself or no one at all.

On the last day of Blakeney's appointed time, they stood in the same front room together. The groom had brought the horses round, and Blakeney watched the baggage loading with a set mouth and hard eyes. He seemed so determined not to speak of leaving that Andrew began, in ready sympathy, to speculate about the painting across from the window.

It was a Zuberan cardinal writing before long windows, with a curtain billowing dizzily before or behind him, tricking the eye. Blakeney stared out through the painted window, and a light came into his eyes. He pointed out a steeple that had once been a minaret, and he talked of domes and parched olive groves and barefoot dancers in the Plaza Mayor. For he wanted the dying remnants of wisdom from the Spain of translators and prophets, before the vicious idiocy of the inquisitors had banished them. And he would not believe that they had all been defeated wholly.

He was speaking fluently now of all he meant to see, when his host entered to say him a brief farewell. Catching the end of the talk, this gentleman paused.

"Does your father go to Spain soon?"

Blakeney held his eye, for they were of a height, and answered firmly that he did. He held himself easily now, a messenger exchanging formalities, but his hands clenched behind his back. His host bade him wait, and all through the interval Blakeney willed himself still, fixing his eyes on Andrew with pleading exultation. Then he was handed letters for the Don de Granada.

They were left alone again, and Andrew stood open-mouthed, half laughing and half alarmed at the breath of this cheek. Before he could speak, Blakeney took two steps across the sunlit floor and seized his hands. Blakeney's hands were shaking, which frightened Andrew still more as he gripped them, and Blakeney's voice rasped as he said: "will you come?"

Andrew wanted to shake him for his brazen wonder and his very innocence. Heat beat in Blakeney's hands like noon sand, and Andrew felt the pressure of his fingers like sun across a window, beckoning on a fresh morning.

"I'll come," he said; "Of course I'm going. Damn it, man, you're not leaving me out!"

Three days later, they came to Zaragoza.

They descended from the high pass after two wretchedly cold nights, and the plains fell away from them under cloud shadow: irregular fields of wheat, sunflowers, red and grey clay marked out in even rows of grape vine and spiked dry olive trees. They rode all that day through the dust of fields with now a low-slung stucco barn on the horizon for the drying of olives, and now a heavy-horned bull, and no people. Their wet clothes coarsened and stiffened.

Andrew liked a day's hunting and a long slog through the mud to end it. He had never woken not knowing where he would sleep. His schoolboy French did not stand up well to the sea of southern dialects here. Blakeney could overrule him in the planning without seeming aware of it; he did not seem to mind eating dried fish for every meal or sleeping in wet blankets that never fully dried.

They slept back to back with the horses. Andrew felt a shift in the warmth of the circle and woke to the pipes rippling, long rolling notes down his spine.

"Does this country have no Inns?" he asked on the second afternoon, as they forded a streambed in search of flat camping ground. The horse's hoofs sliding over the stones jagged the soreness in his back. "Odd's life, but I could do with a mattress, however many creatures I shared it with."

"I sleep better outdoors." Blakeney kneed his horse down the bank with a hand on its sweating neck. "The tribunals here can denounce a man for having the wrong slant to his speech and cut to his trousers. Or for bathing too often. On your life, man, do not laugh. The Jew and the Muslim feel it seemly to come cleansed before their God, in his temple. God knows they have been routed here these hundred years, but the devils have not tired of looking."

The reins slid in his hands, slick with foam, and his voice came muffled. "A man may burn even for keeping company with another man."

Andrew stiffened at his stiffness. "Am I too low company to keep?"

"Too high, I'faith! Come down where I can reach you!" Blakeney cried and, before Andrew could angle his horse away, he caught Andrew's ankle with his own and grasped his shoulder and heaved him out of the saddle. Andrew hauled at him as he overbalanced, and they ended both together in a froth, spreading currents with their knees, aglow with the cold water.

As he stacked kindling on the fire, while the horses grazed, Blakeney followed the wet line of the shirt as it slid over Andrew's pale shoulder, and the sunburn at the nape of his neck, and the water beading along the bone of his shoulder. Blakeney cursed himself. They had tripped each other as they took each other's hands in the river, rising and floundering, until they supported each other up the bank, and Andrew had dropped down to pour out his boots. Blakeney rubbed his calf, where it had hooked one of those boots against the horse's side as his arm had landed on that fire-lit back. He did not know whether his friend did not believe in the necessity of concealment, or whether indeed he had nothing to conceal.

The next day, Zaragoza came on them abruptly. Tilled red earth turned vertically into turreted wall. Bells clamored and climbed within it. The horses halted inside the gate, pressed into the back of a crowd, and from their height Andrew and Blakeney watched a procession down the noisome cobbled street. Torn dry petals blew into their faces, and a phalanx of black-robed men in tall peaked black hats marched abreast. They bore banners on spiked poles and a gilt litter open to the crowd who cried out as it passed. The bearers shouted with hoarse voices and swung thurifers on long silver chains. Pallid, sere or sweating with the short walk on the decline, they proceeded, line after line, with cloth over their faces and slits for eyes that betrayed no reaction to their message. On the litter, they bore a woman. A replica as high as an apothecary's jar, immured in gold-worked skirts, she stared with agate eyes older than the walls, resigned by centuries of witnessing to the long wait before a genuine cleansing might release her from this bier to lie in quiet communion with the rock.

"Ave Maria," Blakeney murmured, soft and sadly, as she began the long climb to the Cathedral. "We have hit on a saint's day." His horse stood with its nose in a fountain. He laid his hand along its wither, taking comfort in its alert swivel of ear.

Andrew bumped up against him, sardonic laughter breaking through the dust on his face. "Lud, Blake, what a spectacle! You'd think the lady could lash the lot of 'em —"

Blakeney clamped Andrew's arm and fixed his eye and prayed to whatever parched God might be left here that anything, the sharp mutter of the field hand at his knee, even anger, would silence him. A hooded torch-bearer turned to them and broke step. The front of the rank crowd heeled back in frantic obeisances, avoiding his eye and sealing him off from those behind, and a voice cracked overhead, and he moved on in the press of the hooded marchers behind.

The stamp and clank and shout and shout repeated went on. The rank crowd swelled about them and stamped and shouted after the procession had gone, up and through the ponderous doors, their tread hollow on the Cathedral floors.

Blakeney cupped water to his face.

"You have forfeited our night's lodgings," he said in English, flushed from the spray. "A line of Voltaire would about finish the matter. For God's sake, peace, man."

He would not stay even to buy food. Andrew would have protested, but for the empty eye slits in the black mask and the fervid repetitions of the onlookers.

"They will know the horses, if they do not know us," Blakeney said, swerving across empty fields once more. "And I know you, friend. You are a young English bull and next door to an atheist, and I'll not have you ranting philosophy in your cups, terrorizing the landlord into _their_ hands to report us before some other guest does it for him."

Andrew heard admiration in Blakeney's censure. Here was the kindling impudence he had followed, to see it ignite. It flared in the evenings, as Blakeney fed strips of olive bark to the camp fires and talked, until Andrew angled for him to look up, out of his Persian fairy tales, and then blinked away from his gaze. In the city, it was banked.

"What hell of a country is this?" Andrew shouted across the red mane whipping over his hands. "A man may not think his own thoughts or laugh in the streets. If we bring each other into danger by traveling in company, nay, by looking at each other, why in God's name did you bring me with you?"

"Not to stop you from looking." Blakeney leaned over him, catching his reins.

Andrew snatched at the pipe, where it hung from Blakeney's pocket. His own voice rose. "And what music do you play at all hours but the tunes of exiles — will you lecture me and play gypsy tunes, and look on every wall for writing you cannot read which will surely have been chiseled off centuries ago?"

"They call themselves _calo_ ," Blakeney said, locking his hand around Andrew's, over the finger holes, until the wood warmed under their fingers. "And if you keep hold, you will reduce me to singing."

The plains gave way to high bare hills of reddish clay. They rode on rough tracks, kicking up dust when the ground was not baked hard. After half a day, they might point out to each other a white spill in the crevice of a distant slope — the walls and red roofs of houses, and the red clay crenelated walls of castles abandoned since the surrender of the Nasrid sultans. These lay high up and away from the track.

They saw no worked land now but olive orchards. In the dusk, a straight, wary man with a burro traded them oil, to sop with their bread. It was fresh and harsh and stung in the mouth.

They slept in barns, and once, south of Jaen, in an empty house with storks nesting in the chimney stack. The storks, a young family, rubbed their breasts with their beaks as the horses circled in the dawn and the riders tied their bundles down.

That night, they pressed on into the dark. And so they saw the city of Granada first by its lights, the lamps of one-story buildings rising from the plain to run over two hills, like the fires of a nomadic camp, and the plaster walls of houses pale against the sand.

They had been seven days in the saddle — long enough for blisters and not near long enough to stiffen muscles unaccustomed to battery. Andrew shifted against the leather, and the constant wind flapped his collar, an he spoke lighter than he had since they had slipped the horses from Blakeney's stable and hared out ahead of the groom.

"I vow I'd near forgot the shine of a lamp! Let's have out that letter, Blake, and make it a race."

"Would you knock them up at midnight to be sure of our welcome? We'll look a couple of begad freebooters."

"Well fed freebooters."

"Then they'll shut us up so we never see each other without a crowd of poker-faced Johnnies to button our coats for us, and carpets so think you trip on 'em, and we'll see nothing at all. I had enough of that in Perpignan."

"We are stiff and sore, the dust of five days is sticking to our sweat, and we know no one. What else is your calling card for, if not to gain us a bed?"

Andrew's voice slipped and broke. he had never been so far out of his reckoning, and the dark ridges marching away and away into solid darkness around him, cracked and striated with lack of water, undid him. His clothes chafed his burnt skin. His relentless companion knew the way out, and he did not.

Blakeney drew close enough to look into his face. The wind blew grit into their eyes, and they welcomed it, for the silence without it was complete. "Faith, then, " he said, handing across the deflated wine skin, "we may use it sooner than later. We'll have you between the sheets in an hour."

But his eyes were courteous and lazy, and he sat leaning away, and Andrew found this lack of response on a barren hill more than he could stomach; he cast about, and the shadow of rock and scrub shifted on the face of the hill opposite. "What do you want to see?"

"There." Blakeney stretched his hand to the farther hill, to the oblong shadows crowning it. Against the sky, Andrew could dimly make out geometric lines in no order he could penetrate. "Have you never heard of the last fortress and pleasure palace of the Muslims in this kingdom? More than fifty years it took to build. Think, Andrew!" He took Andrew by the shoulders. His hands and his voice trembled in his intensity. His horse side-stepped, brushing Andrew against it's sweating shoulder.

"They fed the fountains with aqueducts — water runs in the very walls and floors, they say, and in the court of lions and the pool in the hall of myrtles. Look around you at this dust and think of the orange trees, and the inner courtyards where the women walked, and every inch of the walls chiseled finer than spray with stars and screens and letters; how they must glitter like caverns, and yet men made them. And we are so close; so _close_."

They had a long climb, down and up again so steeply the horses could not have taken it straight. They paid for a night's stabling, off a cobbled square full of men sonorous with wine and women who sold them pomegranates, for Blakeney said they might as well give the horses away as leave them unattended. They took the way on foot, through the alleys and white, one-story, flat-roofed houses of the Albaicin, shadowed with jasmine vines.

Trees grew below the palace, still sustained by the Nasrid's stone-lined water channels. Andrew and Blakeney slipped onto the road by the mouth of one of these, hard under the fortress wall. The night was full of voices. The poorest the machinery of the church drove into hiding now garrisoned the fortification. They gravitated to the ruins of the old craftsmen's houses within the walls, stone chambers scarce as large as straight stalls, and free now from timbers and roofs.

Blakeney and Andrew left the road. They climbed the crumbling bank to the sheer stone wall, without a sound but sliding sand, passed the first portal without challenge, and mounted by slanting stairs to the sentry's walk upon the wall.

Below, in the stone hollow of the old bath, a bonfire shot half a man's height. Men and women sat at their ease around it, as near as the radiant heat would allow, the men leaning on their elbows, the women busy with their hands. A man bright with reflected flame ran his hands along the neck of his aoud. Tones hung in the soft roar of the fire and cracked in a shower of sparks.

Andrew felt Blakeney stir and knew without looking that he drew the pipe from his vest. With tumbling notes he would walk into the circle, and these men and women with their streaming hair and bare shoulders, who had known nothing from booted, mounted men but indignity, would lean back their heads and call to him with indifferent cheerfulness.

The string-player flicked his fingers, one then another, in a blurring strum. Then Blakeney was answering it, and he was down among them, his eyes on the aoud player as though music could speak and he would divine it, and his clear piping rang under the music and over it, holding one note and another in the chords, bucking and teasing, and the strumming quickened in response to it, drawing it upward from the center, gaining in force. They seemed to speak. The guitar player uncoiled to his feet without slowing his hands, and if Blakeney had not had the wooden mouth of the whistle to his lips, Andrew felt sure he would have laughed.

Men and women picked up the beat with feet and hands and carved bones, curved back to back and snapped against knees and elbows and backs of necks. They pulled each other from the ground and leaned back over each others' arms, clapping with their hands above their heads. From the wall Andrew looked down on sparks flying in the wind. Clay pressed under his hands, and wine skins and jars of raw olive oil sent up a sharp stinging scent in the heat of the fire. Blakeney flung himself through the dancers and waved the pipe and shouted up to him.

"Come Andrew, you had much better dance!"

Exposed, Andrew slid down to him, unwilling to face more ridicule. He felt the fire on his back, and the cloth of Blakeney's coat. They were side-stepping dancers, and Blakeney had his hands, drawing him on, and he thought, _God grant the devils sleep sound_ , with a recollection of tall dark points and slitted eyes; _odd's life, but these folk must know how to bait the lion and live_. He was advancing to clear the way for a flying calloused heel and rim of skirt, and Blakeney gave back before him, into the thick of the circle.

Andrew had grown up dancing and indeed knew more of the science than his partner, and his feet caught the staccato flipped-back steps of those around him, and his boots batted the baked earth as their bare feet could not. Women taunted with their hands curled at their waists, laughing, accentuating hips with handfuls of skirt, and men lifted their arms in wide summoning passes, smoothing the air across their flanks and their thick flying hair. Their lithe, undenied announcement of themselves, souls within bodies and ready for impact, caught in his gut, as the beat and counter beat and off beat bore up his movements. He flung his arms high and Blakeney flung his, chest to chest against him. He followed the beat, up, forward, and Blakeney gave back again to his improvisations, spinning in his arm, dipping over it to the ground, pliant, his expression the same stern longing lit with laughter as the player of the aoud who called high ululating praise at the center of the crowd. _Eya!_ he called, a long, mocking salute to them as Andrew arched, urging with his shoulders, and Blakeney's face hung above his shaken in the swimming firelight, with barely a breath of wind between, and he wished dizzily it were less. And it was.

They were spun to the edge of the crowd. A nudge of hand or hip guided them when they could not steer for the pressure of the other's mouth, forehead, astonished hands. The laughter about them carried on unsurprised as they sought shadow, still half dancing and feeling their way long the rock wall, against the main gate, running hand in hand around an intrusion of disused and squatting Bourbon stonework and through the cracked door of the old palace.

They knew nothing of the room where they fetched against an archway, the thongs long loosened from their hair, and rolled up together. Their hands spared no time for the long strokes of script, the line after line of finely interlocking tile and the plaster-work sinuous as new shoots of grape vine. The ceilings rising in great impressed tiers, like reverse impressions of the high peaks of the Pyrenees, rose into darkness too far above for them to see if they looked. They were not aware of moonlight through the pierced stone, stories overhead, through the windows cut into a thousand and one eight-pointed stars.

They did not hear the end of the dance, or the shouting; they had gone too far to hear. They woke against the stone, in a spill of clear early light by the archway. Andrew came out of sleep, drawn gently by the pressure of a mouth, and felt himself lifted away from the hard floor and held, held hard, until he must speak or stop breathing. He put a hand to the back of Blakeney's neck, drawing his head down, stroking his hair, laughing silently with the exultant familiarity of the gesture.

"A hard bed I keep finding for you, my heart," Blakeney said into his neck. "You are not too sore?"

"Good Lord, Blake." He stretched gently, and then he said it again, for his hand brushed the blue-lined stars on the inner plane of the arch. They pulled each other upright, cool in the shadow, distracted even from each other by the carved window screens, the green and orange oblong tiles up the walls in bands and settings around faceted shapes, the plaster-work in white flowing knots and blue inlay.

Damp had blotted them. The room smelled of pigeons, like a field fertilized in springtime. Hand in hand, they walked for a long time, down the long pool as great as a courtyard, empty now and water-stained, and down hallways whose doorways looked across dark space to inner halls, and out again into courtyards of pointed arches and offset pillars and the craters of empty planters, filled with broken tile and dust. They sat together among worn stone lions, leaning against them and each other for warmth. This glory lost, needlessly lost, weighed on them both — on Andrew, for the breadth of its artistry, and on Blakeney for the skill of its artisans. He began to want the assurance of living men.

So they came, well after the light, to the dusty walk of the fort wall. It was empty. The fire had been scattered, and burning brands had dashed against walls far from it. The oil jars were broken or taken. Blakeney pulled himself free of Andrew's sudden grip and ran to the fire pit. The aoud lay shattered and half burnt on the embers. Its neck had been broken off the base.

Andrew felt for the rock. This was final proof against his doubts. His former lightness sat queasily on his tongue.

"Can we find them?"

Blakeney answered him without turning, as he drew the instrument from the fire and jerked back his reddened hands.

"The church have their own captors, and their own prisons. If they resort to public proclamation and the secular law, we will only have the satisfaction of knowing who is to burn."

Andrew picked up a curved slab of clay, the end of a broken jar still glistening with oil, and poured the pool of it over Blakeney's hands. He caught his breath over those hands. He held out his own.

"Give me the letter. Do you put your ear to the streets, and I will be my father's son, or at the least his courier, and try what I can learn of the direction of events. If I get leave, I will meet you in the stable square by dark."

So Andrew entered the Don's courtyard of orange trees, which he had now no stomach for. Blakeney drank and talked and heard nothing; gossip had been cauterized. The aoud player's chords rang in his head, and his taunting cries.

At dusk, two days hence, Andrew found him at a long wooden counter lit by lamps, under the mounted head of an Andalusian bull. He had his elbows spread on the slab of wood and a flagon between of burning liquor with the flavor of anise.

Andrew said, "tomorrow," as a man drops a weight, suddenly, when he sees the end of a forced march. "All of them."

They did not sleep but crept down before dawn to the _quemadero_ , the place of burning. Already the platforms were heaped with wood. They waited with the assembling crowd. The hawkers of dates turned them sick. Andrew could not distinguish one muttering from another around them, but he guessed enough. Blakeney could not bring himself to translate the excitement. _Seventeen to burn, they say, and all of them here in the flesh! None of your dug up bones and effigies of straw._ By sun up the field was thick and crawling with spectators.

The heat grew with the day, and the wine sellers ran dry. Blakeney would drink nothing, for surely the men and women they waited for would have none. Bells rang the hours interminably, and children shrieked.

When they came, they came twisting and dragging at their captors. They came sleepless and gnawed with hunger, jerking away from sudden movements, as a man kicked by a horse gasps and pulls himself up by a fence post, shaken by the sheer force of the pain. They came without dignity and without surprise, and they stared down on their accusers from the height of the stacks of wood and shouted against the cloth in their mouths. On their split logs, they looked like so many charcoal burners with calloused feet and hands.

Burning is a long, slow way to die, even when the smoke smothers before the flames take hold. Blakeney and Andrew fought down the line to the player of the aoud and told themselves they held his eyes, as they turned red with the smoke and then flat with continuous pain, but no one but he could say whether he saw any of that assembly, bound as he was with his head back, or heard the roar and crash of the logs, and the hoarse screams of the victims and the crowd. No one but he could say how high he would have rated their presence, or when he ceased to be aware of them.

Andrew at last pulled his love away from the field when the crowds grew thin. He left Blakeney to saddle up while he dealt with the fee for the horses' keep by paying thrice its worth. They rode hard until the very hills of the city dwindled into dust and hauled off their saddles so that they fell like dislodged stones.

Blakeney knelt in the dust as the sun sank. Andrew saw to the horses, rubbing down their backs, their solid necks, their muscled hocks, more tenderly than he had ever done after a long chase on the moors at home. At last, when he had set out cold meat and bread he had bought by pointing at them, he knelt before Blakeney and took him by the shoulders.

"I'll weep for both of us," he said, "if you will not."

Blakeney knelt as though grown out of the earth, and he spoke like a shifting of boulders. "God help us." His hands closed convulsively on Andrew's arms. "To die like that, Andrew, to die for a song, to die like a shirt stuffed with straw. We cannot even say his name. Do you realize? When we tell this story to our children, how we saw a eight men and nine women burn alive, we will not know who they were."

"They would have been us." Andrew drew him forward, rock biting his knee, and felt him massive, fevered, as blunt as a child. "You will not die so," he whispered, swearing it; "while I live, you will not die without a name."

He felt the arms under his grow still, and draw him in, and his shirt front wet and hot where Blakeney pressed his eyes.

"Come then," he said at last, lifting Andrew once again above him. "In all their honor." But he gripped Andrew to him again, long and silently, as the sun slipped over the sharp rim behind them. He murmured to the hollows, "When Delight of all Delights arouses — concealed, sealed, Cause of Causes — a tenuous radiance radiates, delight of all delights..." he slid his shirt over his head, and Andrew felt him close his hand over the wooden pipe as it rolled against his own skin. "...lustering right in supernal anointing oil, lustering left in delightfully fine wine, lustering medially in delightful purple." The long shadow of dusk turned the dust on the slopes to Phoenecian silk. "Spirit arouses, spirit rises, rendered in spirit, cleaving to one another."

 

 

 


End file.
